By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – July 17, 2007
At the end of my column on this subject last week, I
restated my position that “success,” whether in a Presidency or on a Saturday
morning errands trip, is to be measured against goals set and the degree to
which they have been achieved. Thus, when one looks at the BushCheney (or
CheneyBush, as I have said, your choice) record, is this a “failed
Presidency?” Hardly. Bush set out to achieve what I have on more
than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.” BushCheney does
measure success in terms of polls. Forget the polls. We must look at
what he has done and continues to do with the control of the Executive Branch
that he has.
Upon gaining the Office of the
Presidency (without, it should be noted, actually winning the election) this
man first embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution.
Bush was then little challenged by a very weak opposition. (If one wants
to talk about failure, just consider the Kerry/Shrum Presidential
campaign. It should have been a cakewalk. But since they allowed
Rove, at al, to set the agenda, we are faced with continuing
tragedy.) Further, he was strongly supported for the first six
years by his lock-step Republican Congress, and ongoing, his in-the-pocket
Privatized Ministry of Propaganda. Together, he has used them, and
continues to use them step-by-step and piece-by-piece, to create an Office of
the Presidency with powers that no reading of the Constitution can possibly
support. That’s success, man. Let’s review some of the policy
specifics. They are well-known to most readers of TPJ, but we shall
review them briefly here anyway.
On the foreign policy side, let’s
begin with Iraq. Is it a disaster? Well, it is if you measure it on
the supposed WMD/al-Qaeda original connections, or the “establishment of
Democracy” (not an originally stated goal of the US invasion), and certainly
what has happened to that benighted country since. Ohmigod. First
the Iraqi people suffer under Hussein for 20-plus years. Then they get
Bush and his pro-counsels. What did they do to deserve that sequence?
But supposing when that pre-invasion intelligence analysis predicting chaos in
Iraq following an American invasion (“Analysts’ Warning of Iraq Chaos
Detailed,” Pincus and DeYoung, Washington Post, May 26, 2007) came
through, you didn’t say “ohmigod, how could we possibly go in there?” but
rather “ohmigod, exactly what we are looking for: Permanent War here we
come.” It is becoming ever more clear that the latter was indeed
the BushCheney response. And why would they want Permanent War?
There are three main reasons.
First, it is the central part of
their campaign to create the atmosphere of Permanent Fear at home, presently
the only way they can possibly legally keep the Executive Branch in Republican
hands after Jan. 20, 2009. (See the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, presently
the most likely Republican nominee for 2008). Second, it is a means
of keeping one of their two most important backers, the arms industry, in
clover even after the end of the Cold War oh-so-many years ago. Third, it
creates the basis for creating that "terrorist attack" and coup
d’etat in Oct., 2008 which would keep CheneyBush themselves in power after
Jan. 20, 2009, about which I have written in this space and others on more than
one occasion. And so, even before his famous-in-advance “September
Report” is issued, Bush’s hand-picked Gen.-in-charge Petraeus is saying “we’ll
be there for 10 more years, at least.” If what you want is indeed
Permanent War, that’s success, man. As a side-car to this main foreign
policy thrust, Bush is well on his way to creating a mini-Cold War with Russia
with his “defensive missiles on your borders” and the “bases on your soft
Central Asian underbelly” program. This will help for both the Permanent
War strategy and “let’s keep the arms industry going full blast” plans.
Turning to domestic policy (not
necessarily in order of importance), a major goal is to, as Grover Norquist put
it in his famous mantra: “Shrink the Federal government to the size of a
bathtub and then drown it in the bathtub.” What happened after Katrina
struck is only the most famous example. It’s not incompetence,
folks. How the Federal government acted and continues to act in the
follow-up to Katrina and in so many other venues is exactly how the Georgites
want it to act, viz. the Norquist prescription. They want to destroy all
the functions of the Federal government, except those that have to do with the
military, the prisons, other instruments of oppression and repression, and the
use of tax revenues to line the pockets of themselves and their rich
supporters. It is happening exactly the way it was planned to. The
only big target Bush has failed to hit so far is Social Security and he ain’t
done yet. Chalk up another success for Bush.
Further, Bush has secured the
dominance of the profit-makers, the drug companies, the insurance companies,
and the health-technology companies, in the US health care delivery
system. He has made sure that there will be no significant reform of the
health care delivery system for the foreseeable future, no matter what the
Democratic candidates tell you, for he has totally entrenched the
aforementioned profit-makers. Bush has made sure that there will be no
Federal support for stem-cell research. Bush has made sure that
homophobia is at the centre of the Republican Party’s political attack
apparatus. Bush and Rove have presided (indirectly to be sure) over the
creation of the most powerful propaganda machine since the days of Adolf Hitler
and Josef Goebbels, their Privatized Ministry of Propaganda. Just see how
it wheeled into action, with a common agenda, after the Libby Commutation:
“there was no crime; everyone knew Valerie Plame was covert; Ambassador
Wilson’s findings were false; Libby’s memory was simply faulty.” All
lies, of course, but all reflecting the White House message, and, since it
sounded just like him, most likely coming straight from Karl Rove.
Bush has converted (if I may use
that term) the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into the
“Promotion of Republican Rightist Religion Division” (N.A. Lewis, “Justice
Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission, New York Times, June 14, 2007).
Bush has placed in the Federal Judiciary at every level an extensive cadre of
the most reactionary jurists he could find. He has created a private army
of “security contractors” totally beholden to him, and has used them both
overseas (Iraq) and at home (Katrina and now near the Mexican border, south of
San Diego). They already wear black uniforms. Now all they need is the
personal oath of total loyalty that every member of the SS took to Hitler.
At Guantanamo and elsewhere
Bush is training a huge cadre of torturers and brutal prison guards for
purposes that can only be guessed at (except to say that they go way beyond
dealing with a group of unfortunate Muslims caught up in a web that had no
purpose except systems development). Then there is all the environmental
stuff, no-to-global warming, and etc. And oh yes, I almost forgot, with his
planned fantastical deficits and debt, and tax cuts for his rich friends and
backers, Bush has managed to cripple fiscally any future Democratic government
that would try to do anything positive for the country, along the lines of
carrying out the governmental functions as spelled out in the Preamble to the
Constitution.
It now becomes clear that Bush,
without, then with, and now again without full control of Congress, has
accomplished virtually every one of his objectives, some probably beyond the
Georgites’ wildest dreams of success. He did this primarily because he
and Cheney and Rove and their minions had a very well thought-out plan for
doing so. This man is not impotent. He is highly competent.
In terms of his own terms, he is not a failure by any stretch of the
imagination. In fact, when you compare what he has achieved of the goals
that he set out to achieve with what any other US President achieved in terms
of his goals, Bush is indeed the most successful President of the United Sates,
ever. What can be done with this knowledge and insight, if anyone in the
political arena has the will to do so, will, of course be the subject of more
than one future column.
And so, Peter Baker in The
Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/01/AR2007070101356.html?referrer=email) the day after the
Libby Commutation says: “At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is
looking for answers.” Nadir? One way to describe this
Presidency is, as Cheney once famously said to Sen. Patrick Leahy on the floor
of the Senate, the “F--- You Presidency.” The Libby Commutation is the
best symbol of that that BushCheney could think of. Nadir? Quite
the opposite. This most successful American President has
accomplished just about everything on his original agenda, except
establishing the "Permanent Republican Majority." And if they
can successfully pull off that "terrorist attack" and coup in Oct.,
2008, they will have achieved that too, at least for some time to come.